


relics

by naga-ame (rokutouxei)



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: (you know what that means), implied rivetra really but not quite?, post 57th expedition
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-20
Updated: 2015-08-20
Packaged: 2018-04-16 06:51:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 501
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4615497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rokutouxei/pseuds/naga-ame
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dieter learns of relics and memories and how the Corporal wings away.</p>
            </blockquote>





	relics

**Author's Note:**

> [[this is on tumblr](http://rokutouxei.tumblr.com/post/112335056403/relics)]

A little too late, he would realize.

He had to admit; he didn’t have the sharpest mind, or the swiftest strikes. He has never been anywhere near the best of the Recon Corps. A cadet—someone small, someone new, someone who has not proven skill or power to even deserve a second glance. Definitely, there are some who would look at him with awed eyes—as those types of people do with the Recon Corps in general. They are, after all, living martyrs, (or titan bait) those willing to shed their lives clinging on to false hope and idealism. But Dieter is no hero, not yet.

All Dieter had was heart.

He held the worn, dusty patch in his fist, almost crushing it. 

There’s no mass funeral, or the burning of bodies. There couldn’t have been—there was none left of the dead from the 57th expedition. He supposed he should have figured that out on his own. It was him, after all.  _He_  had carried Ivan’s body on his back. He had dropped him, when the titans came to close. 

It was  _him_.

Had he been at fault? Perhaps. He would think over it—days and nights after he had realized—let his mind rack it over, thumbing the stitches of the patch until he feels it, its threadbare texture, the unwashable scent of blood from it.

The Corporal was (is) so much stronger than he was (is). He would never admit it, not out loud, as any soldier with a respectable amount of pride. He would never admit that a piece of embroidered cloth had patched up the hole in him that losing his best friend twice had borne.

He learned that the Corporal was called the humanity’s strongest not only for skill, but mind and heart.

The Corporal probably had the highest survival rate in any one in the Recon Corps, if not the entire military. He had seen many reach and fall. Friend or subordinate. Or both. They were weight. (or wings.)

He thought of giving the patch back to the Corporal. Thought of apologizing. Thought of returning the relic, the remainder of a memory the Corporal should have taken for himself. Thought of putting it in its rightful place. (Of asking, somewhere in between, who the patch had originally, actually belonged to.) But he would never have the guts to.

In turn, Dieter would never know of a Special Operations Squad, never look on at the (non-existent) memory of a vain yet powerful death to one titan. He would never know who the patch belonged to, who to thank. Whose memory the Corporal had entrusted him with.

But somehow, even in ignorance, as he pockets the patch in the recesses of his uniform, he feels so much better feeling them weigh there, unforgotten, light and swift, like two pairs of wings of freedom (from two people he felt like he knew and did not at the same time) that he would use to fight once more. 


End file.
